Is it on DVD?
According to the KINO catalogue, it will be in November.
There were only a dozen people in the cinema when I went to see it, so the viewing experience was pretty much undisturbed, which was wonderful, however, I must admit, I had to stifle a chuckle when the machine-man-as-Maria was dancing, just because it was so strange.
It seems, from this thread, that the movie is showing in limited engagements in various cities. How can I find out where and when it is playing? If it comes to Toronto I’d love to go and see it with a couple of my nephews.
I just entered “metropolis” “Fritz Lang” and the name of the nearest large city to me into Google News, and there it was.
A regular google search on those terms showed even more local links to it.
Sadly, it seems the Toronto showing was September 11th. 
Hmm, I just found something that says November 11. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Yippeee!
Oh, yeah, the lascivious looks on her audience were a sight! But the laughs had started before that and continued to the end.
There are multiple screenings here, in two different cinemas, so I wish we had picked a different night to see it.
Dunno. I only found the site dealing with the UK releases - http://metropolis1927.com/ (there are some lovely downloadable movie stills and production photos there, BTW, in very high resolution)
The Bryn Mawr Film Institute is sponsoring a seminar/viewing on Monday the 25th:
The price is $25 for members, $30 for nonmembers, but you can get half off if you call 610-527-4008 x105 and mention promotional code “Funsavers.”
I’m bringing back this not-so-old zombie thread because I finally saw the latest restoration of Metropolis. It’s been playing around at various theaters, but I watched it on DVD, and I must say that I was blown away.
I’ve been watching this film for ages. When I first saw it, the only print generally available was the American print, which was not only butchered into obscurity (supposedly because they wanted to cut all reference to a character named “Hel”, just because of that name) but was so faded and washed out that you couldn’t tell what was going on. There was a better quality print arround, but I didn’t see it until many years later.
The 1984 Giogiou Moroder version shocked me. The infinitely better quality of the print let me see things I didn’t know were there – like the opening title animation. I knew which scenes had been added, too, having watched the incomplete version so many times. And by now I;'d read Thea von Harbou’s novelization (which Moroder also cribbed from), so I knew the story. Instead of just title cards describing the missing scenes, Moroder had “recreated” these scenes from stills.
The more recent restoration added much material, which helped a lot, and they restored the quality of the film with photographing of “wet frames” to eliminate scratches, and they used some computer wizardry to restore lost portions of frames. But there was still missing stuff, particularly the story of the “Thin Man”, and 11811 Gyorgy’s visit to Yoshiwara (that Moroder has filled in with stills).
this latest version has everything restored except one scene in the Cathedral that was reportedly at the end of a reel, and got mangled. The newest scenes all have characteristic vertical scratches. You’d think that spatial filtering or computer Fourier transform methods would be able to remove those, or reduce them. But it doesn’t matter – we now have the missing frames.
But it goes beyond the filled in gaps – the print they found showed the film in its proper order, and that makes a huge difference. even having Lang’s script, the censor’s intertitle notes, and von Harbou’s novel didn’t give the real cut, and that is critical to really getting the film. Moroder clearly stuck some scenes back in the wrong places (and cut out others – Moroder’s version, despite the additions, still runs as long as the previous versions, a mere 89 minutes). That’s not that surprising. But the more recent restoration did the same thing, it turns out, putting similar scenes with other similar scenes. What this missed was the intercutting between parallel stories that Lang intended. These bring the story into a more cohesive whole, and emphasize the parallels. Moreover, the structure of the story as a musical piece – with Introduction, Interlude, and Finale, was never made clear in previous versions. The whole thing hangs better and seems to pass more quickly, despite its greater length.
When Lang was driven to a showing of Metropolis in the 1960s, he’s supposed to have remarked, “Why go to see a film that hasn’t been shown completely since 1927?”, and then spoke of its original two and a half hour length. Now, amazingly, we have almost that entire film back.
I just bought and watched the DVD a couple of weeks ago. I’d seen previous versions, but this was the first time I felt as if I were watching a coherent story rather than a series of some cool-looking images. Since I’m used to watching old movies, I wasn’t distracted by the scratchy quality of the recently recovered material–after awhile, you cease to notice it except in a detached sort of “so this is a recovered bit” way.
I’m sorry, but the link in post #27 no longer works.
Is this the film called “The Complete Metropolis” at Amazon.com?
That’s the one I bought: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0040QYROA
Ok, thanks.
It’s also available to watch instantly on Netflix.